Exoteric Gate

The light installation by Nanda Vigo in the spectacular courtyard of the building known as Cà Granda is part of a long-term University of Milan project – and a current must-see in Milan.

The project,La Statale Arte, opens the monumental internal space, designed by eminent Milanese architect Francesco Maria Richini in the first half of the seventeenth century, to a wider public as an open-air art gallery.

Architect, designer and artist Nanda Vigo made her mark in European avant-garde art movements of the 1960s, one of an illustrious generation of Italians who made Milan a world art capital. Chronotopic sculptures, in which lights and reflective surfaces create ambivalent impressions which seem to amplify time and space, have long been the focus of her research.

The work she’s created as a centerpiece for the Richini courtyard is no exception. It consists – a bare-bones description – of a 10m-tall central cylinder emitting coloured light with eight reflective pyramids positioned around it. She’s called it Exoteric Gate. You can see – or rather experience – it there, at the Università degli Studi di Milano in Via Festa del Perdono, until March 12th 2017.

This is only the second of the site-specific installations the city’s main public University, one of Europe’s biggest and highest-ranking, plans to host. So keep an eye on that historic space in the heart of Milan for more large-scale contemporary masterpieces to come.